As far as I can tell, the term heap comes from Algol 68. Algol 68 had garbage collection, and used mark and sweep. Mark and sweep works by searching memory li

As far as I can tell, the term heap comes from Algol 68. Algol 68 had garbage collection, and used mark and sweep. Mark and sweep works by searching memory like a tree, starting at the stack, so Algol 68 called this memory heap memory (at this point, heap was often used to just mean any tree). Languages like pascal and c also began calling their dynamic memory region the heap.